Web Archive Opens a New Realm of Research

James Glantz

Lubos Motl, an undergraduate physics student at Charles University in Prague,
was not feeling very cheerful over the Christmas holidays in 1996. His family
was shaken by instability, he was suffering chronic stomach pain and he had
just been hospitalized after a serious accident at home. And no one at the university
knew much about his scientific passion, a highly abstract and mathematical area
of physics called string theory.

To overcome his personal difficulties, Mr. Motl could only call upon what turned
out to be a remarkable internal resiliency. But his scientific challenges had
a more straightforward solution: an electronic, Web-based archive centered at
Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The archive is transforming the quality of scientific research at institutions
that are geographically isolated and, in many cases, small and financially precarious.
It nurtures top-flight research in countries as disparate as Bulgaria, Colombia,
Cuba, Ukraine, Iran, India, Romania, Russia, Israel, the Czech Republic and
Zambia.

Mr. Motl posted a research paper on the archive and the results were flabbergasting.
Established string theorists were so impressed by his work that he ended up
with a scholarship to Rutgers, where he is completing his doctorate.

"I was at first a little annoyed by the first paper, because it scooped
me," said Dr. Thomas Banks, a physicist at Rutgers and the University of
California at Santa Cruz and one of string theory's prime innovators, who had
been working out a similar idea. "This feeling turned to awe when I realized
that Lubos was still an undergraduate."

Mr. Motl is a striking example of how the archive is changing physics.

"It freed the third world from the need to be in Princeton, Pasadena or
Paris in order to do frontier research," said Dr. Jorge Zanelli, a professor
of physics at the Center for Scientific Studies in Valdivia, Chile, a small
town 500 miles south of Santiago.

Founded 10 years ago by a Los Alamos particle theorist, Dr. Paul Ginsparg,
the archive at first drew interest largely within the United States, but it
now attracts some two million visits a week, more than two-thirds of them from
institutions abroad. With 35,000 new paper submissions expected in 2001 alone,
the archive provides a front-row view of the hottest developments in a given
field of research.

Dr. Ginsparg said the archive, which receives a total of about $300,000 of
financing each year from the National Science Foundation, the Department of
Energy and Los Alamos National Laboratory, was not necessarily intended to reach
scientists outside the United States, but their interest was not unexpected.

Besides spreading new ideas and concepts, he added, the archive has encouraged
multinational collaboration.

"The way these research networks form, and the mutual respect they engender,
implicitly reinforces global understanding across sometimes very different participating
cultures," Dr. Ginsparg said. "Geopolitical boundaries are invisible
to the Internet."

About half the visitors are scientists who connect directly to the main site
in Los Alamos, and the other half are those who use one of 16 sites around the
world where the archive has been duplicated to speed connections. Scientists
may post their work at any stage, even before it has been reviewed by their
peers. Scientists generally replace early drafts with edited versions if a paper
is published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Dr. S. Peter Rosen, associate director for high-energy and nuclear physics
in the Energy Department's office of science, said he had expected participation
in the archive from scientists at major research centers outside the United
States, especially where close cultural ties to this country already exist.
"The surprise is Tehran and Havana," Dr. Rosen said.

Indeed, the difficulty of receiving paper journals promptly from the United
States and other Western countries makes the Los Alamos archive indispensable
for scientists in Iran, said Dr. Farhad Ardalan, head of the physics department
at the Institute for Theoretical Physics and Mathematics and a professor at
Sharif University, both in Tehran.

Another Iranian scientist, Dr. Ramin Golestanian, a physicist at the Institute
for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences in Zanjan, about 200 miles northwest
of Tehran, said that as scientists learned to take advantage of the archive,
it would "eventually give everyone an equal opportunity to take part in
the worldwide science competition, which is a noble achievement."

In Cuba, Dr. Israel Quiros, a physics professor at the Las Villas Central University
near Santa Clara, said the archive had become his group's principal connection
with the outside world since it became available two years ago. His university
has essentially no scientific library.

"Opinions and advice from colleagues of other countries made our work
go in the right direction, and institutional interest increased," Dr. Quiros
said. "In this sense, the archive was the way we entered the world-class
research."

Scientists from a wide variety of institutions, even those with a long history
of producing major research, speak almost with one voice on the importance of
what has become a kind of worldwide movement.

"It is difficult to overestimate the role of the archive in the modern
scientific work," said Dr. Irina Aref'eva, a professor at the Steklov Mathematical
Institute in the Russian Academy of Science in Moscow.

One explanation for the resounding influence of the archive is its price; it
is free, unlike scientific journals whose subscriptions  often hundreds
of dollars a year or more  put them out of the reach of many institutions.

"The first thing I do in the morning is to check the archive for latest
papers in my area of research," said Dr. Radostin Georgiev Kurtev, an astrophysicist
at Sofia University in Bulgaria, whose nonsalary research budget for his small
group is virtually nothing.

Also, in many countries, paper journals may arrive months late, whereas downloading
a fresh paper from the archive generally takes 30 seconds or less, even with
a very ordinary Internet connection.